As it is generally known, electronic mail (“e-mail”) has become one of the most commonly used application programs for computer users everywhere. In the most basic sense, e-mail consists of the transmission of messages over one or more communication networks. E-mail messages can include content entered by a user with a keyboard or other input device, and/or electronic files copied into or attached to the messages.
E-mail messages are stored in electronic mailboxes until their recipients fetch them. Users can check their mailboxes to determine whether they have any messages, and some e-mail systems provide alert notifications when e-mail messages are received. After reading a message, the user is allowed to delete it, store it into a virtual folder maintained within the e-mail application, store it externally to the e-mail application, for example in a local file system, forward the message to one or more other users, send a reply to the sender, or send a reply to the sender and all recipients of the message.
E-mail messages are sent to one or more recipients by specifying the recipients' names or e-mail addresses. The primary recipients for a given message are indicated in a “To:” field provided in a new message user interface. Additional recipients for a message may be indicated in a carbon copy (“Cc:”) field or a blind carbon copy (“Bcc:”) field also presented in the new message user interface. When a message is received and read, the e-mail addresses contained in the “To:” and “Cc:” fields are visible and accessible at the receiving system, while the addresses contained in the “Bcc:” field are not.
Existing e-mail systems often maintain or interface to a database of e-mail addresses referred to as an “address book”. Address books typically associate the names of other users with their e-mail addresses, so that when a user's name is entered into a recipient field (“To:”, “Cc:”, “Bcc:”) of a new message user interface, the system automatically looks up the e-mail address for that user and substitutes it for the user's name in the resulting message.
A problem with existing e-mail systems sometimes occurs in connection with messages having a large number of destination e-mail addresses in their “To:” and/or “Cc:” fields. Many e-mail client programs allow message recipients to easily cause all addresses listed in the “To:” and “Cc” fields of a received message to be added to their address book. For example, if the user clicks on an “Add all to list” option provided in a graphical user interface menu or the like, existing systems might copy all e-mail addresses in the “To:” and/or “Cc:” fields of the received message into the user's address book. This type of feature allows e-mail users to easily develop large address books indicating many other e-mail users. Users with such large address books can then easily send and/or forward messages to the large number of people listed in their address books, resulting in many recipients being indicated in the “To:” and/or “Cc:” fields of those messages. The recipients of those messages can again copy all the addresses from their “To:” and/or “Cc:” fields. A chain of messages generated and treated in this way can cause many user's e-mail addresses to be propagated into the address books of many users, and therefore enable many users with such large address books to indiscriminately send messages to many people. Such features and user behavior can unfortunately result in recipients being bombarded with large numbers of new and/or forwarded messages that they are not directly interested in.
This problem is exacerbated by the fact that many e-mail messages are now being propagated throughout the world that instruct their recipients to forward them to all the people they know. Such messages are often hoaxes or chain letters, and of no real value. Accordingly, the result is that users may receive large numbers of e-mail messages on an ongoing basis that are effectively a waste of computer system resources store them, and/or of user time to delete them. Corporate providers of e-mail to their employers may be particularly concerned with this problem, since the resources being wasted, such as server resources and employee time, are being paid for by the corporation, while these types of messages do not contribute to the corporation's business interests.
Existing systems include many variations of filtering for unsolicited or junk mail commonly referred to as “spam”, but the type of forwarded message described above may not easily be detected by existing spam filters. For example, if a user's friend or relative entered the user's name into the “To:” field of a message along with hundreds or even thousands of other recipients, and then one or more of those recipients includes the user's name in their address book with all the other recipients name, and then sends chain letter or hoax messages to the user based on that address book entry, those messages are not likely to be detected as spam, even they are unwelcome and should be deleted without being delivered.
For the above reasons and others, it would be desirable to have a new system that provides a way for a user to prevent their e-mail address from being openly distributed in mass mailings from other users, in order to maintain the user's privacy, to prevent wasting user time deleting the unwanted messages they may receive as a result, and to preserve network and computer system resources that may be used to forward and store such unwanted messages.